Friday, July 06, 2012

Pascal Galinier, the ombudsman of Le Monde, has received a flurry of angry letters after Serge Le Luyer's decision to hide the identity of a Muslim teen killer under a Slavic name.Hiding the identity of alleged teen criminals is hardly an abnormal way to proceed in France, since protecting the identity of minors is required by French law, and the decision to use the name "Vladimir" for the 16-year-old who strangled a 13-year-old might sound logical at first since the high school student was indeed born in Russia.

But that does not take into account the fact that the region of the Russian Federation that "Vladimir's" family hails from was not the Slavic part but the Chechnya republic, meaning of course that the presumed killer and all of his family are Muslim.

Giving the alleged killer a (fake) Muslim name — Mohammed, Abdullah, Ali, Samir, Suleiman (since his real first name does start with the letter S) etc — instead of "Vladimir" would thus have made more sense, say the readers in protest of what they perceive as political correctness — "transforming a Muslim connotation into an Orthodox Slav" — especially since "the great persecutor of Chechens is a certain Vladimir (Putin)…"